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Ah, Netflix: Savior of the United States Postal Service and my evenings, at least since Seabass wiggled into the world.

For a bunch of boring self-righteous reasons I won’t go into here, we don’t have television. Nope, not even the free creepy religious stations. But we do have a TV, DVD player and VCR (you heard me right) because I’m pretty sure I would expire if I couldn’t watch movies. Let me spell it out for you: I am obsessed with them. Always have been, and probably always will be.

If I were asked to describe my own personal nirvana, it would include the local art house movie theater, a bucket of popcorn, and hours with nowhere to be. But I’m not picky. Even a bad movie is a good movie to me. It’s the whole experience – buying the ticket, the red velvet curtains, the moment the lights dim – that floats my boat.

In the narrative of my life, Seabass entered stage right as the whole movie-going experience exited stage left. The fact that I wouldn’t see a grown-up movie without the assistance of a babysitter for at least 10 years simply did not occur to me during pregnancy. Case in point: The last movie I saw in a theater before Seabass’ birth was the documentary Babies. Seriously. If I had it to do over again, I probably would have seen Evil Dead 19or some such inappropriate rubbish.

Thankfully, there is an escape-making machine called NETFLIX that pumps DVDs directly to my doorstep as if by magic. Moreover, if we are between movies via the mail, there’s always “Watch Instantly” for a handful of flicks – most of them pretty horrid – to watch on the laptop whenever we so desire. It’s a thing of beauty.

I don’t mean to glorify tuning in and dropping out. That’s exactly why we don’t have TV. But during these first months of Seabass’ life, we’ve needed nightly breaks from reality in a way that I never could have expected. Sure, at the beginning it took about five tries to get all the way through Last of the Mohicans, but even so, everything from the film’s bloody scalpings to Daniel Day Lewis’ melodramatic “I will find you!” suited our escapism needs perfectly.

So if I find myself in the midst of a challenging day – whether it’s that Seabass isn’t sleeping or I’m cranky from exhaustion or that we’re just pushing each others’ buttons – I know I can count on that flat red envelope to take me far far away in just a matter of hours.

Thank you, dear Netflix, for suspending real life one movie at a time.

Our family does the same thing yours does. We’ve been doing it for 6 years now. No TV reception. We recently switched from Blockbuster’s service to Netflix. There is a world of difference. And if we want a kiddie movie for, well, the kiddies. All we have to do is pop the Netflix disc into the Nintendo Wii and VOILA! We have those same on demand choices but on our TV and with a parental lock.

I can completely relate to this need. During the first three months of my son’s life, my husband and I watched the entire series of Lost, through season five. We had never before watched Lost, but for some reason at that time in our life it suited our escapism needs.